For the third time this century, the Adversary has harnessed the Pharaonic chariots of totalitarian ideology, hoping to deprive humankind of its spiritual freedom. First it was a red chariot - Communism; next, it was brown - Nazism; and now, green - Islam... Islam today has surpassed "the long arm of Moscow" and gained a foothold everywhere, sowing death on every side, from the Philippines to New York, from Moscow to South Africa.

...A death wish accompanied by homosexuality of SS and death cult of Nazi doctrine in Germany, Communist asceticism in the Socialist camp, and a longing for death on the part of Islamic jihadists are all the very essence of the Adversary, who strives to put an end to Creation, and to life.

Nice gratuitous reference to homosexuality there. Radyshevsky's (not particularly original) thesis is that there are two paths in the world: the "Path of Jerusalem", which is God's plan to bring about global unity, and the "Path of Babylon", which is Satan's (who is described as "God's ape") plan sow division while preaching unity through false doctrine. Further, the way God brings about the true path to unity is through the essential nature of the Jews:

Instead of the primacy of a single, monolithic ideology, the Jew with his Shema insists on the primacy of conscience, on hearing God's voice in man's free heart... Instead of Nazi Ordung, Soviet pravoporyadok, or Islamic sharia, the Jew strives for liberation from the spirit of Egyptian slavery that survives in every totalitarian ideology.

This Jewish striving naturally includes "The visionaries of the early twentieth century...- from Herzl to Jabotinsky". While rejecting the idea that Holocaust victims were being punished for sin, Radyshevsky still argues that they brought it all on themselves:

God created the Jews to fulfill a universal spiritual mission. If they refuse to exert themselves and to realize that mission, they become superfluous and die off, like any bodily organ that ceases to perform its designated function. God's mission - more precisely, the horrible perversion of that mission ("God's ape" mentioned earlier) - is then taken up instead by the Adversary, whose first task is to amputate Judaism, now "dried and withered." The pain of the knife then compels that organ to remember its calling, and to begin functioning anew.

...The Holocaust, then, was necessary in order to preserve the soul of Judaism. The gas ovens consumed (or, more precisely, weakened) both the ghetto mentality and the assimilationist mentality, thus liberating the Jewish soul for a new ascent - the creation of the State of Israel - in order to advance the world to a new, unprecedented level of consciousness.

However, and rather bizarrely given his rejection of the idea of Holocaust victims as sinners:

As for the souls of the Nazis: they, no doubt, have been reborn in Kampuchea, Rwanda, or Kosovo, to be themselves victims of genocide, to atone for their own sins.

The mystical purpose of Israel and Zionism is then explained in terms of pop-Hegelism:

The solution that Israel will show the world consists not in the wide dissemination of form (democracy), but in the penetration of its actual essence into the very depths of the individual and of society. The essence we mean is an integrated consciousness, imbuing the West's civilized forms with a thirst for the spiritual values of the East, while channeling the East's religious zeal into humanitarian, constructive civilized forms...The culmination of that History will be the creation of a perfect social organism - a unique spiritual-political construction that will realize the Eastern ideal of a community of love, while preserving Western human rights and personal freedoms.

The only small snag is that "Unfortunately..., Israel today is very far from understanding its new Mission." Things then get rather mystical:

Human evolution can be viewed as a process of harnessing increasingly more powerful energies: from sexual energy, to mechanical, to thermal, to electrical, and finally - atomic energy.

But it does not stop there. After those comes mastery of the most powerful energy: spiritual (or, if you prefer - mental-psychical) energy... What will save Israel is not mastery of nanotechnology, but mastering the technologies of creativity through the spirit. What has long been known by only a select coterie of kabbalists must now move from the realm of esoterica to exoterica.

Like the laws of physics, every schoolchild must understand the laws of spiritual science regarding proper goal orientation (teleology) and proper focus of will (known in the Kabbalah as kavvanah). A sufficiently powerful creative mindset, when fortified by steadfast determination, will invariably be realized concretely.

...The universal soul is a kind of magical crystal, divided into seventy distinct segments, each representing one of the seventy nations...Israel is a small diamond of seventy facets, each of which is particularly close to one of the nations' seventy facets.

After much rambling along these lines, the rather bland punchline is that Israel contains immigrants from around the world, and so could show the world how to get along. There's also a further reference to "the hidden powers of human consciousness and psychic energy". A call for some political reforms in Israel follow until, at last, we get to the meat - his analysis of Islam and the Palestinians. He begins rather obscurely:

"I‑Slam" is the demon which possesses Islam and compels it to abuse all peoples indiscriminately.

Freud then gets a look-in:

The Islamic world consists of hundreds of millions of men tormented by two basic instincts: sex and murder, Eros and Thanatos. Sharia, which suppresses that first passion, sublimates it completely in the second, and -- as luck would have it -- global jihad provides the opportunity. While the consciousness of these unlucky slaves of I-Slam is subjugated totally to the sword and the phallus, at the very bottom of that consciousness lives a yearning to be rescued from that yoke. Moreover, the more savage that consciousness becomes, the more savage and impassioned is the subconscious yearning for liberation.

But what about the Palestinians?

...countries that demand that we create a state of Philistines in Judea and Samaria and hamper Jewish progress - on which their very own well-being likewise depends - are in fact only seeking to perpetuate the fragmentation and diabolization of humankind.

...Not for naught do the Palestinians of our day call themselves "Philistines". While not consanguineous descendants of the ancient Philistines (despite their pseudo-historians' futile attempts to convince us otherwise), they are the spiritual descendants of Goliath. They have resurrected not only the Philistine hatred of Israel, but also the ancient Philistine abomination of performing human sacrifices, particularly child sacrifices: preparing their young boys for shahada, a sacrifice on the altar of the new Moloch, the jihad.

In other words, resolving this conflict peaceably by reaching a compromise with Evil and agreeing to co-exist with it, is equally impossible as co-existing with Nazism was.

So what's to be done? Radyshevsky rejects the standard "transfer" solution of the Israeli far-right, and instead lays out the Jerusalem Summit approach, which we've seen before: offer Palestinians money to leave, allow them to remain as non-citizens in a "municipal enclave", or allow them to become citizens if they can prove loyalty (Radyshevskey is opposed to racial exclusivity):

This land is our land. Ishmael here has no claim, but if he will acknowledge Israel's dominion over this tiny land, then we will be very happy to let him remain.

However, it is also hoped that the Palestinians will be transformed:

Israel must consistently integrate the Palestinians into the civilization of the House of Abraham. This means a steady deprogramming of the Palestinians, whose youngest generation has been brainwashed by Arafat's propaganda machine and the jihad ideology for thirteen years since Oslo - all with Israeli and Western funds!

Israel and the West must establish control over education, the mass media, and the clergy.

...It is difficult of course to imagine that the age of Islamic Zionism is near. But a mere fifty years ago it would have seemed fantastical to think that someday there would be hundreds of millions of Christian Zionists -- as there are in the world today.

We're also told that

The Jerusalem Summit's recommendations have earned the enthusiastic acclaim of many of the world's social and spiritual activists, from members of the United States Congress and the British Parliament's House of Lords, to the Chief Rabbi of Israel and the Dalai Lama.

The book also contains standard musings on the dangers of Muslims in Europe, and calls for a "Council of Civilizations" based in Jerusalem.

Radyshevsky divides the world into twelve "primary civilizations", and declares this to be "likely" to be an omen, since there are twelve gates into Jerusalem and twelve tribes of Israel. This seems to me to be symptomatic of the main problem with the whole book: there's a sheen of general knowledge, but everything is run through the grinder of one mystical idea. Of course it all fits together wonderfully - because everything is defined according to Radyshevsky's predetermined political and religious agenda. Although ranging widely through history and across geopolitics, there is very little real engagement with what people believe or why - and despite his supposed opposition to the "primacy of a single, monolithic ideology", all he has to offer is a rather eccentric grand narrative which he imposes over all human motivation. If Palestinians object to living under occupation, there's no need to ascribe real human desires to their complaints: rather, we can diagnose morbid psycho-spiritual reasons which also just so happen to show that Radyshevsky's Greater-Israel Zionism is the exactly the same thing as the will of God.

Radyshevsky's book is far from unique: Hal Lindsey, Mike Evans, and a whole slew of Christian Zionist paperbacks have a similar Manichean perspective. Unlike those books, however, Radyshevsky's religious Jewish Zionism does not require the intellectual incoherence of pushing America to be active in the Middle East when God is about to wrap things up through an inevitable Last Days scenario anyway. But how acceptable will this be to the summit's main allies, the evangelical Christian Zionists? Talk of kabbalah and "psychic energy" will not play well, and he also writes that

After the inevitable victory over Islam, mankind will understand the prohibition of considering any one religion exclusive.

While some evangelical Christian Zionists see validity in Judaism through the idea of a "dual covenant", this will be pushing things too far (although, of course, there are also non-evangelical Christian Zionists who may be more agreeable). In this context, calls for a world council based in Jerusalem may even stoke Last Days paranoia...

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